WHEN Stern magazine held
their sensational Hamburg press conference to announce
the find of "Hitler's Diaries" on April 25, 1983,
David Irving was
smuggled in as special correspondent for the rival
Bild mass-circulation newspaper with the task of
torpedoing it.

Bild editors knew that Irving alone had duplicate
copies of the fake Hitler documents, including pages of
the "diaries" that Stern actually began publishing
that day, closely followed by Newsweek in New York
and the Sunday Times in London.

Adopting high-powered marketing methods at their press
conference to sell the multi-million dollar diaries,
Stern began by presenting to the hundreds of
television and newspaper journalists a one-hour video
film describing how the documents had been found in East
Germany by their star journalist
Gerd Heidemann. On
this video film German television journalist
Klaus Harpprecht,
hired to speak the commentary, warned that there would
probably be those who would impugn the authenticity of
the diaries, including historians with, as he over --
boldly put, "no reputation to lose, like David Irving.
"

Seconds later Stern's executives bit their tongue when
they realised that Irving was actually in their midst.
When Stern editor Peter
Koch (later dismissed) called for questions,
Irving got to the floor microphone first, whispered
"Torpedo running!" to the Bild editors who had
accompanied him, and brandished on high the documents
that proved the whole multi-million dollar batch of
diaries and documents to be counterfeit.

In four deadly questions Irving asked

why the forensic affidavits shown to journalists
did not include a laboratory test on the ink, although
Stern officials had verbally spoken of such a
test having turned out positive;

why Hitler was seen in the video, after the Bomb
Plot of July 20, 1944, having to shake hands with
Mussolini using his left hand, and yet Stern
claimed that he was capable of writing his diary that
day without change in his handwriting;

how Stern could explain away obvious
discrepancies in the documents that accompanied the
diaries, including fake letterheads and poems;

and why, when Sunday Mail editor
David English had
asked for a written guarantee that the diaries were
genuine before signing a contract with them, Stern
editors had refused to sign such a guarantee.

Without answering these questions, Stern
officials on the stage ordered the microphone switched
off. The press conference broke up in fist-fights and
shambles. Irving was physically escorted from the
room.

But his torpedo had struck home.

NBC's
Frankfurt correspondent rushed Irving across Hamburg to a
studio for a live satellite link-up with their morning
television programme "Today", broadcast coast to coast in
the United States one hour later. Rival company ABC
showed Irving and documents that night on
"Nightline".

A few days later West German forensic scientists
confirmed what Irving had declared: tests on the ink,
paper and glue proved the diaries were fake.

IRVING HAD obtained his copies
of the documents during routine historical research in
West Germany as early as December 1982, and had concluded
a few days later that the documents were entirely faked.
He had written warning letters on December 16 to
journalist Heidemann, to millionaire Stuttgart
entrepreneur Fritz Stiefel, to Munich document
authenticator Professor August Priesack and to the Texas
autograph collector Billy Price explaining why the
documents were clearly faked. Most blatant among the
fakes was a "Göring letter" dated July 23, 1944,
typed on printed stationery headed
REICHSMARSALL instead of
REICHSMARSCHALL.

When features editor Magnus
Linklater of the London Sunday Times
telephoned him later that month, December 1982, after
negotiating with him for weeks to obtain access to the
documents, Irving also warned him that he had concluded
that the diaries and documents were faked.

He declined the Sunday newspaper's offer to write a
feature article on Hitler forgeries.

Disregarding Linklater's earlier promise not to go
behind Irving's back, the newspaper cynically went ahead
with its own plans and started publication in April 1983.
It paid a savage price, becoming like Stern an
international laughing stock for weeks.

THE DIARIES had been faked, it
turned out, by Konrad
Kujau, a gifted Stuttgart confidence
trickster. Irving located Kujau's abandoned ''workshop"
in May 1983. He pointed out to accompanying journalists
that the word "MILITARIA" on the
bellpush was in the same typeface as the word
REICHSMARSALL on the
stationery.

Irving was in court in Hamburg on July 8, 1985, to
hear sentence passed on Kujau, who had confessed to
forging the documents, and
journalist Gerd
Heidemann. The judge exonerated Heidemann of
any charge of forgery, but imposed a prison term on both
men: because the mystery of Stern's missing
millions remains unsolved.